The A-Rod Question

As to the whole Alex Rodriguez freak-out that now has engaged my brethren and sistren -- Thanks, Molly -- of the sporting press, I say very little except to say that most of them have very good hearts, and that they are nice people, but that far too many of them seem to admire the jurisprudence of the former East Germany just as fervently as they seem to deplore its approach to athletic medicine. The only person making any kind of sense on the whole business, besides Scott at LG&M, is Dave Zirin at The Nation, who is vainly shouting down a well about major-league baseball's complicity in the Greatest Scandal There Absolutely Ever Was at the lower levels, a complicity that involves the quite ordinary exploitation of impoverished Third World labor by large American corporations. It is no accident that the Dominican Republic, where you can buy the evil PEDs over the counter like candy bars at Home Depot -- And why does this country have an obesity problem? Do Hershey Bars at a Home Depot have anything to do with it? -- functions as the Northern Marianas Enterprise Zone for major-league franchises. (Zirin also points out that a lot of the players who are currently selling out their fellows in the public prints are the products of the suburbs of the United States, and that this ought to be noticed more. He's right.) The tattered children who survive this system and managed to hit the major-league lottery are then expected to give up the potions that got them noticed once they get to Yankee Stadium because a lot of sportswriters had some Moral Outrage lying around the garage that they weren't using.

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I hope Alex Rodriguez plays every game the rest of the season. I hope he avails himself of every subparagraph of the Basic Agreement that allows him to do so. I hope, in the process, he humiliates his union, which is presently engaged in selling out its membership, and angers every moralistic yahoo with access to a media outlet. If he's the last guy in the country fighting for true due process, then we're all in more trouble than I thought.